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Archive for 'Rupert Murdoch'

As the Canberra Times continues its conversion to conservatism and its cost driven agenda of regurgitation, the time approaches when, if my current mood survives, I will bid it farewell and return to The Australian and the battle against that newspaper’s various opinions and ideas. It at least is a more worthy opponent. And for revolutionary socialist analysis there is always Solidarity.

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They might only be straws in the wind but two recent pieces in The Australian suggest Rupert Murdoch might have realised his preferred Abbott government and its open attacks on the poor and working class has been a failure. He might be inching towards a more cooperative approach with labour and Labor.The union movement (especially the remaining rank and file) should remember the lessons of the Accord. There is an alternative to supping with the devil, whether that devil be a smiling ALP or a scowling Liberal Party. That alternative is to fight against the attacks of the bosses and their politicians on wages, conditions, safety, jobs. If you don’t fight you lose.

Phone hacking went on at an industrial scale, the court was told. It wasn’t just celebrities, writes Simon Basketter in Socialist Worker UK. Trade unionists and ordinary people had their phones hacked too. But this is not just about bad journalism. The scandal has revealed the unholy alliance between the police, the media and the political establishment. And it goes to the very top. The most prominent of the accused were David Cameron’s close friends.

The exorbitant pay rewards the top ABC managers, interviewers, commentators and news readers for playing the bourgeois game so well and guarantees they continue to do so. It also removes the celebrity journalists from the working class. Someone on $75000 in the ABC right now could do the job these over paid voices do so well for their masters and do it better because they would not be, at least initially, part of the bourgeoisie’s club.

It says much about the state of politics in Australia that this Murdoch filth can smear their excrement on the Australian body politic. This is not just because mainstream politics has veered way to the right. It has. It is because Labor and unions have led this stampede – the ALP politically and the unions industrially. This has created the sewer pit from which Murdoch’s rags can spew their shit.

No doubt former News Ltd employee Creina Chapman is the best person to be appointed a senior adviser to Tony Abbott. But shouldn’t the Opposition leader be subjected to some serious questioning about this? Who could do that? Oh I dunno, maybe Greg Sheridan from The Australian when he is next out for dinner with Abbott?

Rupert Murdoch should be in jail, awaiting trail. His News of The World has hacked into the phones of a murdered girl and the relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and of people killed in the 7/7 terrorist bombings. It has paid bribes to police. It has cosied up to the politicians, as they have with […]